Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  Edwin opened an office in Parsippany, New Jersey, in the late 1960s, but his business was mostly on the road. People lost eyes everywhere. Plus, existing prosthetics needed to be cleaned and repolished every now and again, maintenance that patients were more likely to pay for if they didn’t have to travel an inconvenient distance. Edwin worked almost the entire East Coast, Connecticut to Florida, crafting and polishing and painting fake eyeballs. Danielle estimated that he earned, approximately, “a shit ton of money.”

  He came across the tobacco farm because it was near one of the cities on his route. Edwin and his wife, Eleonore, were horse people, and he bought the farm intending to build stables and riding rings and to convert the fields into pastures and paddocks. When Eleonore moved from Parsippany with their four children, she brought one horse, ten chickens, and a single pair of mating peacocks she happened to raise as a hobby.

  At about the same time, a family from Rochester bought the land across the road. They had three children close in age to Edwin and Eleonore’s kids, the middle one a long-haired misfit of the sort teenage girls often find attractive or at least intriguing. “You can imagine what happened,” Danielle said. “It’s the late seventies, there are all these kids getting drunk in hay barns, and then bam, here I am.” There was a shotgun wedding, a short marriage, a quick divorce before Danielle was old enough to know her parents had been married. Her father was an ironworker, and he’d go off to wherever there was a job, Texas or Oklahoma, and then come home for a month or two with a pocketful of cash. He’d run around with his daughter, take her to the water park, and then be gone again.

  Danielle stayed on the farm with her mom and grandparents. Her main interest, and the farm’s main purpose, was horses, but there were peacocks in the trees and on the roofs and scratching out dust baths in the dirt. The females nest on the ground, hidden in tall grasses and shrubbery, and one of Danielle’s jobs as a kid was to follow them around to find out where they were laying. Occasionally, she’d find an abandoned egg that she’d crack on a rock baking in the sun to see if it would fry like on The Flintstones, which it never did, but mostly, she watched for chicks to hatch. When they did, she would catch them and put them in a pen until they were big enough to escape foxes and raccoons and the like. Other than that early intervention, the peacocks were feral: They weren’t medicated or cooped or fed a special diet, though they would flock to the house when they heard Eleonore rattling a bag of Toasty O’s on the porch.

  Years passed, the peacocks a background blur for the horses. Danielle went off to college and the farm started to decline. As Danielle would tell me later, her grandfather was a religious man who believed the world would end before he left it of his own accord, and no one plans for a future he’s certain will never arrive. Edwin and Eleonore lived in the present. They spent thousands showing Arabians, traveled the world ten times over, embarked once on a sixty-nine-day cruise. “He made that shit ton of money,” Danielle said, “and blew every penny of it.”

  She came home for spring break in 2004, her senior year of college, and found a for-sale sign stuck in the turf at the edge of the two-lane. Operating a horse farm requires money and labor, and Edwin and Eleonore didn’t have enough of either, even with the land whittled down from the several hundred acres they’d originally bought to only sixty, part of which was sheltered from the taxman in a charitable trust. Danielle wasn’t having it. She went to the end of the drive, pulled the sign out of the grass, and announced she’d stay and help run it.

  She never did go back to college, but that’s okay. She fixed the place up, got it looking so nice that neighbors would come by to see what the new owner had done and be surprised to find Edwin still there. Danielle adored her grandfather. He walked her down the aisle when she got married in 2007, and she held his hand in the hospital when he had cancer seven years later so he wouldn’t die alone. She kept managing the farm until the estate was settled, and she eventually bought it outright with her husband, Doug.

  There were about fifty horses on the property at any given time, most stabled, some Danielle’s, and maybe two dozen peacocks. Predators killed a few of the birds every now and then, but chicks hatched every summer, so the numbers never appreciably dwindled. All told, there had been peacocks on Danielle’s farm for three human generations and more avian ones than anyone had bothered counting.

  “I have three over here,” she told us, waving back behind a shed. We followed her to a little hut cobbled together from bricks and boards and scraps of goat wire. “There’s two cocks and a hen in there.”

  The hen was on a high perch that lifted her into the wired-over window of the hut. She was crosshatched by thin shadows, but we had a clear view of her upper half. Her neck and head were predominantly white and splotched with emerald and traces of bronze, as if she’d been splattered with glitter paint. Thin white stalks sprouted from her scalp, each topped with a dot of fluff, like a tiny bouquet of Seussian flowers. “She’s pied,” Danielle said in a matter-of-fact way that assumed I knew what she meant, which I did not. “The males are regular India blues.”

  I moved two steps to the other end of the hut, bent down, peered through a lower panel of wire. Both males were on low roosts, trains sagging onto the floor, necks rising into shadow. A band of sunlight slashed across their breasts, which were an oversaturated sapphire, the color of fairy-tale lakes, and they appeared metallic, almost polished. The feathers on their wings, in marked contrast, were covered in muddy striations of brown and beige, the same as the pattern on Comet and Snowball, as if the wings were sturdy embankments to contain the blue, retaining walls to prevent it from leaking out.

  “I want to keep these three together,” Danielle said. “They’re a social clique.”

  “That makes sense,” I said with a bluffing certainty. “How much for the three?”

  Negotiating in dollars for such specimens felt wrong, somehow embarrassing. We should be talking pouches of gemstones or magic beans.

  “Maybe two hundred dollars? Let me think about it.”

  “So three peacocks?” Louise interrupted, directing the question more to me than to Danielle. She stepped back, swatted at the flies buzzing around her; she was standing next to a pile of horse manure the size of a yurt.

  I turned toward Danielle. “Would we have to keep them penned up?”

  “For a while, maybe six or eight weeks, until they figure out that’s their new home. Once they eat out of your hand, they should be fine.”

  I straightened up, repositioned myself to look at the hen again. She was watching the empty sky, oblivious to or uninterested in the people staring at her.

  Pied. I made a mental note to look that up. Also, India blue.

  “So why are you getting rid of these, anyway?” I asked.

  “They’ve been getting killed,” Danielle said. “A great horned owl showed up, and it’s been tearing their heads off. I’ve been finding decapitated peacocks all over the place.”

  “Really?” Louise and I glanced at each other, processing the image. “Just, like, everything but the head?”

  “Yep. Heads torn right off. I guess owls like the brains or something.”

  “Owls get that big?” Louise asked. “Wouldn’t it have to be, like, the size of Emmett?”

  “Oh, they’re huge! I saw it. I was coming home one night, and it swoops down and just stands in the middle of the road for a minute. It’s like the size of a toddler.”

  Louise flicked her hand at another fly. I could tell she was trying to picture this boy-size owl. Probably wondering why we’d never heard about a menace of giant owls attacking labradoodles and children. That was beside the point: We were here to buy peacocks. “All right,” I said, slapping my hands together. “We’ll need a couple hours to talk it over, figure out if we’ve got room. Can we call you later?”

  “Sure. But I want to find them new homes fast, so it’s first come, first served.”

  I nodded. “Understood.”

  I did no
t understand. Peacocks were in frenzied demand? I’d only ever seen them from a distance in zoos, and now I’d stumbled upon this bustling, secret bazaar of exotic birds. It felt vaguely illicit.

  Walking toward the car, I stopped, bent down. “Is it okay if we take a couple of these?” The ground was littered with peacock feathers as long as my arm.

  “Please,” Danielle said. “Take as many as you want.”

  * * *

  Louise had spontaneously volunteered to take a peacock because a peacock, in a fundamental sense, is not a bird that one possesses so much as experiences; as with an especially moving work of art, the simple act of looking at it will stir emotions. A peacock, she imagined, would patrol the yard like a sentry in dress uniform, high-stepping through the irises and roosting on the low branches of the cedars or the high peak of the barn. Every so often he would throw up a fabulous spray of feathers for no other reason than to remind us that such a spectacle is possible. It would be inevitable and yet somehow a surprise every time.

  That is what one peacock would do, but only one.

  Louise did not want Flannery O’Connor’s multitudes. She wanted a single peacock, a manageable number proportional to our small phony farm. The property was suitable for a pair of chickens, not a flock, after all, and the paddock was properly sized for a miniature horse, not a Thoroughbred. We were scaled for a solitary peacock, Louise insisted. Three was another matter altogether. A part-time job, she said. A petting zoo.

  “You can’t have one peacock,” I told her on the drive home. “He’d be lonely.”

  “People have one dog, don’t they? One cat. One snake.”

  Her logic was exasperating, but it did not change the fact that our peacocks had already formed a group, a bond. You can’t just break up the band.

  “And it’ll be friends with the chickens,” she continued. “Just like the chickens are friends with the goats and the horse—”

  “Wait, wait,” I said a little too gleefully. “We don’t have one chicken. One chicken would be cruel. Because they’re so social. Snowball and Comet need each other.”

  “True,” she said. “But maybe peacocks aren’t like chickens.”

  Twenty-four hours earlier, I hadn’t wanted any peacocks, and for the same reason I’d never wanted koalas or a narwhal: The idea had never occurred to me. Now that it had, now that those fantastical birds had been presented as a reasonable proposition, of course I wanted one. A peacock, it seemed to me, was a flicker of happy imagination, an impossibly magical creature escaped from a dewdrop of unicorns and wood nymphs. The ones on Danielle’s farm were almost transcendent, shining through the dust as if they were refracting light from a star we couldn’t see. I felt a little sad for Danielle. Once she found new homes for all the birds, she would be left with a plain, boring horse farm.

  “They won’t roam,” I said. “We’ll put them in a pen. For now.”

  “We can’t have three peacocks.”

  From the backseat the boys began cheering for three peacocks. “Let’s get six peacocks!” Emmett shouted. “Let’s get fifty peacocks!”

  I leaned toward Louise and whispered, “They’ll get their heads bit off if we don’t take them.” The boys didn’t know this gruesome bit, and I didn’t want to open up a conversation about decapitation just then. But it did seem important to remind Louise that this purchase wasn’t an acquisition, it was a rescue.

  “If we get fifty peacocks, you will have one less mom,” Louise said over her shoulder. “But maybe we’ll get a pair.” She patted my hand. “So nobody’s lonely.”

  Chapter Three

  Before we could bring any peacocks home, two issues had to be dealt with immediately, those being food and housing. I assumed peacocks could get by on chicken feed for a few days. But where to put them? The inside of the barn was too cluttered, and the smokehouse was too small. I would need to build something, which I was planning to do for the chickens anyway. But how big did it have to be? Would they need a lot of height, someplace high to roost? Danielle’s hut was only a temporary holding cell. Surely three peacocks would need something more spacious.

  I turned, as one does in such emergencies, to the Internet. I hesitated over the search term. Are peacocks confined in a pen? An aviary? I settled on the chickenlike “peacock coop,” which is not, according to Google, an obscure search term. There were straightforward questions (How do I build a peacock coop?) and basic tutorials (How to Build a Peacock Coop!) and displays of both the twenty-two and thirty-four best peacock enclosures on Pinterest. I skimmed the blue hyperlinks until, halfway down the first page, glowing like a beacon, was an entry from Martha Stewart’s blog called “Expanding the Peafowl Pen.”

  If Martha Stewart had a peafowl pen, it would be the best peafowl pen, which was obvious from her proper use of the word peafowl To most people, there are only peacocks—boy peacocks and girl peacocks and baby peacocks. As a technical matter, however, there are peacocks, peahens, and peachicks, and they collectively are referred to as peafowl. It’s an unpleasant word, what with that ugly ow sound, and there’s almost never a reason to use it: No one has ever been awed by the beauty of a peafowl. Still, it is the correct word, and anyone dispensing pen-building advice should have a mastery of the nomenclature, even if I never expected to use it in conversation myself. I assumed, for that matter, that pen was the right term, but that it probably could be used interchangeably with coop, especially if one already intended to disregard the peacock/peafowl rule. Also, Martha Stewart in that post referred to her group of peafowl as a muster, which seemed to me much more dignified than calling them an ostentation, as some people do but which is cloyingly descriptive, like calling a group of frogs a hopper or a nest of vipers a squiggly.

  That said, the language was all secondary. Martha Stewart’s pen would be the best pen because she is Martha Stewart. I respect the Martha brand. She does not half-ass anything and she is a very good teacher, which I knew because I’d been down this apprenticeship road with her before: By God, Martha taught me how to make a Bûche de Noël. And I’m much better with a hammer than a jelly roll pan.

  Martha’s peacock residence resembled a miniature and impeccably kept pale gray barn. It had shiplap walls, a shingled roof, and thirty-foot runs of galvanized pipe and nylon netting extending from each side. A series of forty-two photographs chronicled two craftsmen, Pete and Chhiring, measuring and pounding and bolting and stapling one of the runs—the expansion referenced in the headline—until everything was square and level and sturdy.

  I did not have a Pete or a Chhiring in my employ, and I had neither the time nor the money for galvanized pipes and shiplap. I did have long boards, though, a stack of half-rotted two-by-eights salvaged from old garden beds and piled under the shed roof of the barn, and folds of ancient chicken wire that were here when we bought the place. Close enough. If I cleaned out the rest of a pile of useful rubbish, I could build a pen against the side of the barn, under that part of the roof that jutted out like a carport, the same spot I was going to put a coop for Comet and Snowball. It wasn’t level or square, but it was sturdy, with a metal roof and walls on the end and one side. Front to back was sixteen feet and the posts holding up the roof were ten feet apart, a footprint that would give three birds 160 square feet—not cavernous but better than the hut they were in. There was plenty more barn, too; I could always expand. And the ceiling was almost eleven feet—a handful of roosts at various heights would make it feel like a triplex.

  Behind a broken lawn mower and eight broken shutters was an old screened door and, behind that, enough scrap lumber to build a frame around it. I screwed the long boards to the posts as a perimeter along the ground, and I used six more as stanchions rising to the rafters. The chicken wire was streaked with rust and creased in awkward diagonals, but I guessed there was enough to cover both exposed sides. My coop wouldn’t be as attractive as Martha’s pen—it would be a cage constructed literally from garbage—but it would be effective in the short term.
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  Five hours after we’d met, I texted Danielle. WORKING ON A COOP NOW. HOW MUCH FOR THE TRIO, AND IS A TOMORROW EVENING PICKUP GOOD?

  Louise had compromised on only two, but I knew she’d come around.

  Danielle replied immediately: WELL, I ALREADY SOLD THOSE 3… BUT HAVE SINCE CAUGHT 2 MORE! A MATING PAIR MALE & FEMALE. $100 TOMORROW & YOU CAN HAVE BOTH?

  Good for those three, I thought. Safe from the owl. And the price for two seemed like a deal. I’d never shopped for peacocks before, but fifty bucks apiece for mythological apparitions seemed like a steal. I texted back: SOLD!

  The garbage coop was framed by the middle of the next morning, and the first run of chicken wire was stapled in place before noon. Comet and Snowball watched, softly clucking, from a sawhorse that was going to be repurposed as a temporary perch. Every so often, one of them would flutter down and scratch at an insect in the dirt. Farm equipment sheltered there for a hundred years had left an assortment of detritus—loose nuts from old machines, rusted nails, broken bits of clay pots, snipped ends of copper wire—that I’d mostly raked out the night before. In the process, I’d broken up the top half-inch of soil, which I assumed would be better for peacocks to walk on than a gumbo of sharp objects and loose gravel. Exposing a buffet of bugs was a bonus for the chickens.

  Danielle texted me just before three o’clock, when I was putting the last screws into the spring hinges for the door. SO… PLANS CHANGED AGAIN. I HAVE 3 FOR YOU TO TAKE. WOULD THAT BE OK?? JUST LIKE THE FIRST 3 YOU LOOKED AT. AND… CAN YOU POSSIBLY COME SOONER?